The program book for the Society of Biblical Literature 2012 Annual Meeting and the program book for the American Academy of Religion 2012 Annual Meeting, which will take place together in Chicago in November, are both now online. I’ll be reading one paper and serving on one panel at the SBL conference, and will be part of a group exploring the possibility of creating a new program unit at AAR. Here are the details of the sessions:
S18-134
Nag Hammadi and Gnosticism
11/18/2012
9:00 AM to 11:30 AM
Room: S505a – McCormick Place
Theme: Nag Hammadi and Gnosticism: New Work
Nicola Denzey Lewis, Brown University, Presiding
Michael Kaler, York University
Religious Experience and the Gospel of Truth (30 min)
Eric Crégheur, Université Laval
The motif of the five trees in the “Gospel of Thomas” and in ancient literature (30 min)
Marvin Meyer, Chapman University
Kathleen Gibbons, University of Toronto
Valentinus’ Moral Psychology (30 min)
James F. McGrath, Butler University
Revisiting the Relationship between the Mandaean Book of John and the New Testament (30 min)
Here’s the abstract for the above paper:
During the first half of the twentieth century, there were circles in which one could practically take for granted that Mandaean sources stemmed from followers of John the Baptist, and thus provided the background for at least some sections of early Christianity (as Rudolf Bultmann famously maintained in relation to the Gospel of John, for instance). The tide turned against this view, and not without reason. But for the most part the specific claims made by critics of that stance did not do justice to the Mandaean sources any more than the scholars whose views they opposed. Since then, additional Mandaean texts have been published, and English translations of works previously unavailable in English are underway. Moreover, since then the Nag Hammadi texts have been published and allow for the question of the relationship between Mandaean and Christian sources, and between Mandaeism and Christianity, to be correlated with other Gnostic sources that were not available in the time of Reitzenstein and Bultmann on the one hand, and their critics such as Dodd on the other. On the one hand, the date of the Mandaean sources makes it inherently more likely that similarities and overlaps with New Testament texts are due to interaction with those texts and with Christianity on the part of the Mandaeans, rather than vice versa. On the other hand, many features of the Mandaean treatment of the figure of John the Baptist, his parents, and his wife and children, are not easily accounted for in these terms. This paper examines whether dependence in one direction or another, mutual dependence on earlier tradition, or some combination of all of these types of interaction best accounts for the similarities and differences between the Mandaean Book of John and the Gospels of Luke and John in the New Testament in particular.
And here’s the panel session:
S17-330
Now Presenting: Preparing, Submitting & Delivering Conference Papers
11/17/2012
4:00 PM to 5:15 PM
Room: N134 – McCormick Place
Theme: Hosted by the SBL Student Advisory Board
Presenting at a conference entails much more than the brief delivery of an academic paper. In this session, our esteemed panelists will discuss how to successfully navigate the process of proposing and presenting your work. In particular, they will discuss the ins-and-outs of composing and submitting an abstract as well as the do’s and don’ts of stepping on stage to deliver the final product. If you plan to be a participant in the SBL and/or other academic conferences, you will not want to miss the insights offered in this session sponsored by the SAB.
T. Michael W. Halcomb, Asbury Theological Seminary, Presiding
Clare K. Rothschild, Lewis University, Panelist (20 min)
James McGrath, Butler University, Panelist (20 min)
David R. Bauer, Asbury Theological Seminary, Panelist (20 min)
Discussion (15 min)
Here’s the one from AAR:
Panelists:
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